How to Optimize Your Confirmation Email Design and Make It Bring You More Sales
Email marketing is not just about newsletters! Transactional and confirmation emails shouldn’t be neglected when it comes to design and content. An exceptional confirmation email can help you nail another purchase in minutes.
In this article you’ll learn:
- Why lack of confirmation emails create uncertainty among your customers;
- How confirmation emails fit in your subscribers’ hierarchy of needs;
- Why you should use confirmation emails for further customer engagement;
- What techniques you can use in your confirmation emails to engage your customers.
In this article, we’ll tell you how you can improve customer retention and boost conversion with transactional emails, and confirmation emails in particular.
What are transactional and confirmation emails?
Transactional emails are usually triggered by user action; therefore, their open rates are eight times higher than any other type of email. These types of emails contain information that is really important for your customers, so your customers are interested in receiving it.
There are 5 types of transactional emails:
- Registration email
- Notification email
- Confirmation email
- Feedback email
- Cart abandonment email
Thus, confirmation emails are a subgroup inside the transactional email class. You receive a confirmation email when you subscribe for a newsletter, or place an order on an e-commerce website.
Do your confirmation emails satisfy your subscribers’ needs?
Hierarchy of needs
1. Respect
Respect is the foundation of any business relationship – that is why you should make sure a user knows that he or she subscribed for newsletters and will receive emails afterwards.
2. Function
Your emails should function well, which means they should render well on different types of devices.
3. Value
Your subscribers should find your emails useful. Emails should contain some value for them, i.e. some kind of news, deals, alerts, or other things. You can check how useful your emails are by looking at conversion rates and revenue.
4. Remarkable content
Your emails should contain something worth sharing – like an attractive deal, exclusive content, or special experience.
Why should you make more out of your confirmation emails?
In most cases, confirmation emails are a really underdeveloped point of communication.
They offer you an opportunity of a one-on-one conversation with your customers,
Moreover, confirmation emails provide you with fresh information on where your customers are in their life cycle and what they want. You can use this data to send them more offers that would attract their attention.
How can you optimize your confirmation email design to make more out of it? Check out the following tips:
Design
- Keep email design recognizable and in line with your brand, because your marketing efforts should be consistent among all the channels.
- Make your emails mobile-friendly, because nearly 50% of emails are read on mobile devices. Yet only 56% of brands send mobile-friendly emails.
- Don’t forget the essential tips – optimize your email design for viewing with images disabled, make sure all links lead to the proper destinations, and proofread your emails for spelling errors. Let’s not forget about these best practices.
- Add links to social media in your email design. Let users become your friends and promote your brand. Emails with social media links have 55% more clicks than emails without any links.
- Include a link for newsletter subscription, just in case your customers want to receive updates about new deals or exclusive content.
- Include a link to customer service. Make it easy for your clients to reach out to you if they are in need.
- Include a link to shipping tracking. This will help to reduce uncertainty and anxiety for your customers, in case the shipping confirmation email doesn’t come to their primary inbox. Moreover, emails with an order tracking link have almost 50% higher click-through rate than emails without it.
Personalization
- Add cross-selling items to your order confirmation email. Add pictures of goods or even services that are relevant to the purchased items. For instance, if your customer ordered an expensive phone you can include an order confirmation, as well as an insurance offer, or compatible phone accessories.
- Use predictive models that make recommendations to your customer based on their previous behaviour.
Promotion
Add a promotion, discount, or coupon code to your order confirmation email to incentivize future purchases, because 44% of customers made their second purchase based on a promotional email.
Subject lines
Clarity in subject lines works better than creativity.
Key points of this article:
- You should set up automatic confirmation emails on your website to show respect to your customers and reduce their uncertainty;
- You can improve the user’s experience for your confirmation email design by using limited website navigation, social media links, order tracking links, and event tracking;
- Confirmation emails are not a dead-end in communication with your customers – you can improve their design and use them for both cross-selling and upselling.
Original Article